Picture "The Gates - Central Park, New York City" (1979/2005)
Picture "The Gates - Central Park, New York City" (1979/2005)
Quick info
limited, 25 copies | numbered | signed | colour photograph on Dibond | framed | size 104 x 184 cm
Detailed description
Picture "The Gates - Central Park, New York City" (1979/2005)
The first ideas and sketches for the project "The Gates" were created in 1979. The temporary installation was erected in New York's Central Park in 2005.
Colour photograph, 1979/2005. 25 copies on Dibond. Photograph by Wolfgang Volz. Numbered and signed by Christo, Jeanne-Claude and Wolfgang Volz. Motif size/sheet size 100 x 180 cm. Size in frame 104 x 184 cm as shown.
Producer: ARTES Kunsthandelsgesellschaft mbH, Bödekerstraße 13, 30161 Hannover, Deutschland E-Mail: info@kunsthaus-artes.de
About Christo
1935-2020
Christo achieved world fame by extraordinarily wrapping large landmarks and landscape elements in fabric.
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born 13 June 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, to a son of an industrialist family. From 1953 to 1956, he studied at the Sofia Academy of Fine Arts and visited Prague in 1956. The following year, Christo attended the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. In 1958, he went to Paris where he first began to wrap things – this was the beginning of the "wrapped objects".
Starting in 1961, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) have caused a worldwide sensation with their spectacular wrapping projects. Especially the project "Wrapped Reichstag", which was planned from 1971, became an art event in 1995.
The work for the installation of the project "The Gates, Central Park, New York, 1979–2005" began in 2005.
A total of 7,532 gates, each 4.87 m high and up to 5.48 m wide, were placed over a length of 37km all over the pathways in Central Park. The gates, made of saffron-coloured fabric floated down from the horizontal end of the steel gates to 2.13 m above the ground, creating a flowing, billowing incomparable spectacle. Only 16 days later the installation was set to close. But what remains is the memory of a lost landscape.
Christo strictly refused sponsorship from the public or private sector and insisted that the projects be realised only for a limited period. This leads to an extraordinary concept: Only the sale of the sketches, models, and drawings made the realisation of the installations possible, and only these documents ultimately bear witness to it. Therefore, a Christo is a work of art in its own right, but also a building block of something larger – and not least a testimony to the creative process.
Christo passed away in 2020.
The field of graphic arts, that includes artistic representations, which are reproduced by various printing techniques.
Printmaking techniques include woodcuts, copperplate engraving, etching, lithography, serigraphy, among others.
A process for producing images by the action of light, which became widely known in 1839. Photography quickly became the basis for the expanding image industry that pushed the manually produced pictures, paintings and drawings aside.
The avant-garde painting adopted photographic form elements, to restore the painting’s rightful significance. In the 1920s, many avant-garde painters devoted themselves to photography. With his photographs and photomontages, called "rayographs", the American painter Man Ray developed new means of expression in modern art.
The Pop Art of the 1960s varied and alienated the public photograph through technical means. The American pop artist Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) is the most famous master of this art movement with his images and image series created in this way.